


trapped

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Cousy In Space, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Feelings Realization, Friends to Lovers, Future Fic, Outer Space, POV Phil Coulson, Skye | Daisy Johnson's Superpowers, Spaceships, Subtly Not Lincoln Friendly, Too close for comfort, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 14:55:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12301524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: They just need to hide here for five hours.Written for the #CousyInSpace event at johnsonandcoulson.com





	trapped

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hamsterfactor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterfactor/gifts).



Her contact told Daisy the trip would be around five hours long and suddenly Coulson thinks it’s an impossible, unbearable length of time to be trapped in this hiding place.

Getting down there, in the crawl space under the floor, the size of a big box, is a breathless rush. They almost get caught right there, the footsteps of the ship’s crew over their heads just one minute after they manage to squeeze in the small space.

They hold their breath as voices in an alien language fly over them. They can see the members of the crew through the grating, walking from one side of the aisle to the other, carrying merchandise and provisions for the journey. They look scary even from this angle, the kind of stock baddies from the scifi films Coulson used to love (back when his life hadn’t become so tangled with notions of scifi itself). They are a rough crew, and dangerous, but their off-the-books status as merchants meant they wouldn’t go through any controls until they reached their destination, meaning it was a chance for him and Daisy to hitch a free ride. A risky one, but still. He’s never shied from risky, much less in the past few months of travelling between strange planets far from human knowledge.

The crew carry guns, Coulson and Daisy hear them clink against their belts, like an unintended warning.

Daisy is very good at being quiet. This is one of the things that impressed Coulson about her when she started taking her Level 1 agent exams. Many junior agents struggle with that point (Fitz is still strikingly bad at it, Simmons got better after her stint in Hydra) but Daisy was adept at it even before training. It comes in handy now, Coulson thinks, but it also unnerves him a bit, because he is focusing to keep his breathing even, and not to fidget and not to shift in his position, and for her it seems like no problem at all.

Because meanwhile Coulson is recalling his SHIELD training and evening out his heartbeats. He wouldn’t mind so much except he keeps remembering how long the trip is going to be, down here. Daisy is looking at him, her eyes slightly widened, watching his expression from up close. It makes Coulson wonder if she knows, if somehow she can tell by looking at him, the fact that he didn’t do so well in small spaces, until SHIELD drilled that fear out of him. It’s easier to manage phobias when you know exactly where they come from, it’s easier to block out fears when they come from one single moment, one memory of being trapped in the same car, the same accident that killed your father, waiting between twisted metal until the paramedics could get you out. The way Daisy is looking at him, he wonders if she somehow knows, if that disturbingly precise empathy of hers extends so much, and so literally. She’s read his file, knows the bare details of it, she has imagination, an easiness for making just the right connection between and this moment. Looking back at her Coulson almost wants to tell her, remembers wanting to tell her for years, wanting her to know about that moment and that fear, and about years of anxious elevator rides, car rides (mitigated when he got his own license, and he still doesn’t like when someone else is at the wheel).

She is giving him a gently quizzical look and he shakes his head, still not daring to make a sound even though the whole crew seems to have gone elsewhere on the ship. Then, when he is more confident they won’t be heard, he detaches his prosthetic and places it on the floor between his legs, to leave more room on the upper part of their hiding place, for both him and Daisy. His legs are awkwardly draped over Daisy’s, to make use of all possible space. It takes them a bit to figure out the best combination of elbows and knees and heads, Coulson wishing he was as flexible as her, feeling guilty about taking up so much space - he’s not a big guy, and that had always been an advantage in his line of work (he wasn’t intimidating, so both local authorities and victims, witnesses found it easy to let him near), but right now he wishes he was even smaller. 

“Okay?” he asks Daisy in a soundless voice, once he has decided on a position.

He wants to make sure she is not more uncomfortable than she needs to be for the duration of the trip, but he knows it’s likely she wouldn’t tell him if she was.

She nods, and Coulson hopes it’s the truth anyway.

The first hour is the quickest, and in a way easiest, to get through. Their adrenalin is up and they mostly spend it listening for noises of the crew coming and going. 

Then it starts getting hotter, with the engines on full power, and he can feel sweat down his back. He can smell Daisy’s sweat too, mixed with her natural scent and the alien soap they used from that motel on the latest satellite. It reminds him of that time they tried Fitz’s simulation, how they sparred, and Coulson remembers being affected by that detail, the scent of sweat, but he also wondered how accurate it was, did Daisy smell like this when she was going toe to toe with a sparring partner, a real now? Now he knows.

He has also really wanted to get that chance for a rematch, to spar for real with Daisy, but in all likelihood they will end up dying in some corner of this distant, forsaken galaxy without ever getting it. But he doesn’t want to get fatalistic just yet - not when they got this far, not when Daisy managed to find this ship.

The lights go out. Only tiny emergency flickering above them. The crew must have gone to get some rest. It’s deep space. Soon the systems switch to essential - no more oppressive heat, not even between two bodies pressed up against each other as they are now. The temperature starts dropping little by little.

The silence is thick enough that they’d easily notice if someone was coming their way, which gives a bit more freedom to chance speaking a bit. Daisy has her stopwatch (her elbow pressed against Coulson’s side when she checks it), so they don’t lose track of time and are ready when the moment comes to slip out of the ship, presumably as dangerous as slipping in.

After another hour Coulson’s restlessness is under control, but his left leg starts to hurt.

“What’s wrong?” Daisy mouths. Coulson can feel her breath on his cheek. Can feel her natural, Daisy-esque worry for him.

He shakes his head and smiles, signalling it’s nothing serious.

“My leg has fallen asleep,” he whispers.

She lets out a noiseless chuckle.

“I can help with that,” she tells him in a soft voice.

Her hand skims over his knee for a second. She raises an eyebrow, asking for permission. Coulson has a vague idea of what she’s asking, but not entirely, yet he nods almost immediately. Daisy wraps her fingers around his leg loosely, barely touching at all.

At first the feeling is subtle, and not unlike having a limb fall asleep in the first place. He watches Daisy’s brow furrow in concentrations, he knows creating tiny vibrations like this requires more skill than causing a large scale earthquake. The effect of those tiny vibrations grows, though, and the annoying, prickling feeling in his muscles starts to subdue. It doesn’t feel alien, like Coulson thought it would, like an invasion. It’s just as if Daisy was massaging his leg, except using her powers, which Coulson realizes he thinks about as if they were just another part of her body.

“I’m not hurting you, are you?” Daisy asks, looking unsure.

Coulson shakes his head confidently. He gets the feeling she hasn’t tried to touch people with her powers, softly, like this, much before. He can understand why she wouldn’t, after being forced to attack Mack. But before? Something about that doesn’t sit well with her. Daisy was in a relationship with someone who was Inhuman, too, who should have been able to understand her better than anyone, someone she wouldn’t have to worry about being scared of her powers.

“Tell me when you want me to stop,” she says. She’s close enough that Coulson can feel her words on his cheek before hearing them.

The uncomfortable sensation in his legs starts disappearing bit by bit, like a knot being untangled, replaced by the pleasing hum of Daisy’s powers gently pressing at the core of his muscles. It almost makes him want to close his eyes, like hearing a lullaby. He gets the feeling in calf back quickly, but he doesn’t immediately tell her to stop, worried he might sound too eager, that she might think he dislikes feeling her powers work on his body. He doesn’t want her to think he is afraid of what might happen if she loses control.

“Thank you, it’s fine now,” he tells her.

Daisy stops and for a moment Coulson misses the warm vibrations.

“Happy to help,” Daisy mutters, pressing her back against the wall as much as she can, to give Coulson some space to flex his leg a bit and check that it really is fine.

And they go back to waiting. 

It’s almost nice, here in the darkness, with Daisy’s soft breathing drowned out by engine noises, and her closeness preventing the bite of cold under a floor only minimally heated. 

“You didn’t have to come for me,” Daisy says, all of the sudden.

“What?”

Even though she’s so close he strains to see her expression in the darkness.

“When you escaped the prison. You could have just… gone back to Earth. It would have been easier from there.”

He couldn’t have. _Physically_. He knew that then, and he knows that now. Only he’s not sure how to explain it. He reaches for some platitude, but one that Daisy might enjoy.

“No one gets left behind. Remember?”

She smiles, the kind of open trusting smile Coulson hasn’t seen that often in the last couple of years ( _since Hive_ his brain fills, with a pang of guilt). 

“You would have done the same, if our roles were reversed,” Coulson adds. But he’s pretty sure she’d have done it with more class.

He feels her gaze on him.

“I would have,” she says, something odd on her voice, gripping Coulson with the urgency of something she needs him to know. “I would have gone to the ends of the universe.”

It feels uncharacteristic of Daisy to say such a thing, but not uncharacteristic to feel things so deeply, to hold such convictions. 

She says nothing else for a long time, and Coulson doesn’t either, and it feels like they are drifting aimlessly in space, in the darkness, together, no ship, no scary crew of merchants. Just them. 

Then Coulson feels a weight on his shoulder, Daisy’s cheek pressed up against it, her head resting there. 

 

+

 

Daisy holds him and he arches his body until his head is between her breasts and he can smell it perfectly, her scent. Real, not a computer simulation this time.

She then runs her hands along his sides, wrapping her fingers around his wrists. She pulls him away from the embrace, bending him back against the bed, pinning him to the mattress. The gesture reminds Coulson that they still have to have that sparring session, after all.

His body feels light, freed, as it had been all the way from the ship, after he was able to walk and flex his limbs. He felt that way all through the drink they had in the bar downstairs, both eerily reminiscent of Earth’s bars, yet completely unfamiliar. It was an awkward half hour, the way he suddenly had no idea how to talk to Daisy anymore, his words very slowly adapting to his change of perspective. He had heard of these situations described as someone flipping a switch on and illuminating a room, but he felt nothing like that. It was rather like a blindfold had been pulled off his eyes, like he hadn’t been seeing Daisy clearly until now. In the bar he fumbled with those new words, telling her the whole story of how his father died, and feeling trapped. Daisy quietly held his hand. 

Now her fingers dig into the palm of Coulson’s hand. She pins him with the gentleness and confident of a butterfly collector. There are strange noises outside their room, but not alarming ones, just “strange” in the sense that this is what you get in an alien planet, an alien city. In the morning they’ll try to board another spaceship, one that would carry them pretty close to home, finally.

It was Daisy who asked for one room at the desk, and Coulson followed, not pretending he didn’t know what had happened between them in the ship, what the weight of her head on his shoulder meant. Daisy always braver. Or eventually braver. It made him wonder when things had changed for her, or when she realized. It made him sad to think it was long ago and he had missed it.

She moves Coulson’s hands together, so she can hold his wrists with just one hand, the other skimming over his chest and stomach, like surveying a recently purchased territory on a map.

Coulson smiles at her possessiveness, he never thought he was something worthy of being possessed, much less by someone like Daisy. He likes it, the nervous energy in her grip, a hunter expecting her prey to slip through her fingers. It excites Coulson, thinking of himself as her prey. All these metaphors stumbling out of him. He smirks and rolls his hips under her weigh. Daisy gives him a smile of satisfaction.

“Who knew all I had to do to get into your pants was get you trapped with me in a under the floor of a spaceship for five hours?” she jokes.

Coulson frowns. “That doesn’t seem that easy.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she says, probably admitting more than she realizes.

She drops her mouth, in all seriousness, unflirty, to Coulson’s lips. Her body covers his, Coulson happy to be trapped by choice, after all those hours hiding in the spaceship. She makes him feel freer than ever, this way. Her playfulness is gone, replaced by a very Daisy hesitation, “are you sure?” clear in her eyes, feeling the responsibility of having started this. but has she really? Maybe it was there, waiting to be started.

Coulson mock-struggles against her grip, arching his body to catch the doubt in her lips and swallow it. She trembles, or maybe it’s her powers, peacefully released while she holds Coulson. He hopes it’s her powers and he hopes to feel her touch again, like back in the spaceship. But different. Because now it’s all different. He doesn’t need to know what this all means, this change. He knows Daisy Johnson would go to the ends of the universe for him.


End file.
